Mind-wandering software knows when you've zoned out

Snap out of it. Those who find themselves daydreaming when they're supposed to be reading a report may soon find a device is telling them to pay attention. A detector can now figure out when a person's attention shifts from their task and get them to focus on it again.

People are thought to zone out about 20-40 per cent of the time; these instances have been found to result in performance failures, poor memory recall and low reading comprehension (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439 ).

To combat the issue, Sidney D'Mello and Robert Bixler at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana hit on the idea of making interfaces intelligent enough to spot a user's waning attention and take action.

Their software tracks a person's eye movements with a commercial eye tracker. The system figures out if the person's mind is on the task by observing specific features in the way the eyes move, such as how long they fixate on words, where the eyes move next, their overall movement patterns and other contextual cues.

If it thinks the user is no longer concentrating, the system can pause the session, notify the reader, highlight the content or even display the missed content in a different format. "This can lead to improved learning," says D'Mello. "For high stakes tasks such as military or aviation, this can prevent catastrophic disasters."

The detector could also be used to evaluate study materials on the basis of how well they engage students.

The first version of the mind wandering detector is expected to be ready in a few months' time. It will be used to develop an intelligent text presentation system that intervenes when it detects a wandering mind.

This type of interface reflects our increasing sophistication in yoking computational technology to cognitive and neural science, says neuroscientist James Giordano of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC. "Such technology could be utilised to improve cognitive focus and performance, and perhaps affect creativity, and this may incur provocative ethical, legal and social questions of how, to what extent, and in whom this technology can – and should – be used."

The system will to be presented at the User Modelling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP) conference 2014 at Aalborg, Denmark, this week.

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Probably not a good idea to start daydreaming on the job (Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/REX)